In recent years, it's become increasingly popular for organizations to switch from having their internal IT department handling 100 percent of the organization's needs to outsourcing their day-to-day maintenance and help desk needs. If you're wondering how your business can benefit from making this switch, consider the four benefits of outsourcing IT needs I've outlined below. It's important to remember that outsourced IT doesn't replace an internal IT department. Instead, it supports your internal IT department.

4 Benefits of Outsourced IT Services

1. Covering Software Licenses and Cloud Service Subscriptions

With the pace of change within business technology today, staying up to date on the latest and greatest is no easy feat. The lifecycle of business technology is getting shorter and shorter, and businesses with only internal IT support seem to end up paying for software licenses more, and more often. With outsourced IT services, you don't pay any additional costs for software licenses or cloud service subscriptions. Instead, your infrastructure is always up to date, without needing to make additional purchases and investments.

2. Eliminating Routine Maintenance Expenses

Performing routine IT maintenance internally can have a pretty drastic effect on your bottom line. When you employ one or two full-time IT staff members to handle routine maintenance, patches, firewalls and upgrades, you're spending much more than the sum of their salaries. Consider the expenses associated with recruiting, interviewing, onboarding and managing these individuals. Not to mention, you have to work around vacation time, sick days, training courses and holidays. When all is said and done, the cost of handling routine maintenance internally can be much higher than outsourced IT services.

3. Increasing Internal IT Productivity

Now, the benefits of outsourced IT services aren't strictly financial. The impact of outsourcing IT services has a positive affect on your internal IT department. Rather than spending their day-to-day putting out fires and keeping the lights on, your IT staff can focus on the long-term stability of your on-site IT infrastructure.

By outsourcing, your employees have access to reliable help desk support in their moments of need. And at the same time,your IT department gets to stay focusedon core responsibilities including network infrastructure installation, maintenance and improvements for your customers. As an added benefit, removing day-to-day maintenance and support tasks can improve overall job satisfaction of internal IT staff as they can spend more time on larger, more impactful projects.

4. Getting Peace of Mind

Perhaps the greatest benefit of outsourced IT services is also the most difficult to assign a dollar amount to. Within just about any area of business, there are two things that strip away peace of mind almost instantly: finger-pointing and having to repeat yourself. Outsourcing your IT services has the potential to eliminate both.

When you partner with a single provider that covers every aspect of your IT services, you won't get caught up in vendors blaming manufacturers or one provider blaming another - because you have a single provider. That one provider is not going to blame themselves, and they're not going to blame you, either. They're going to fix whatever problems arise. Plus, the consistency that comes out of working with a single provider means you're able to work with someone who knows you, knows your business and wants to help.

What IT Services Can Be Outsourced?

While the main focus of this article was on the outsourcing of day-to-day maintenance and help desk needs, outsourced IT services can include so much more. Some businesses choose to outsource particular portions of their IT needs, like network management, desktop as a service, disaster preparedness and recovery, security, lifecycle management and everything to do with line-of-business applications. Beyond this, many of our customers partner with us for the management of all of their IT needs, even things like building out technology roadmap that includes two-, five-, even ten-year plans to grow and scale their companies well into the future. Put simply, if you have IT needs, they can be outsourced.